After a month of relative quiet, the Robert Mueller investigation exploded back into headlines in a big way this week, with new developments suddenly coming so thick and fast and on so many different fronts from Monday night to Friday morning that it was difficult even for news junkies to keep track of them all. If you managed to miss these developments, or just quailed (understandably!) at the prospect of trying to make sense of what they all mean, here’s a quick refresher to get you up to speed.
1) Paul Manafort’s Bad Idea
Mueller’s team started the party Monday evening with an explosive new filing against a totally unexpected target: President Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort. After being indicted a year ago on charges of tax evasion and illegal foreign lobbying related to his previous political work in Ukraine, Manafort in September struck a plea deal in which Mueller dropped many of the charges against Manafort in exchange for his cooperation with Mueller’s wider investigation. (This came about a month after a separate trial found Manafort guilty of eight counts of bank and tax fraud.)
At the time, this seemed to wrap up Manafort’s chapter in the Mueller case—until Monday’s filing, which accused Manafort of continuing to lie to investigators even after the plea deal was struck. This was baffling—why would Manafort torch his single path out of a likely life sentence?
True believers thought they found their answer Tuesday in a bombshell Guardian report, which claimed that Manafort had held secret meetings with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London between 2013 and 2016. The organization that changed the course of the 2016 election by releasing emails stolen from the Democratic National Convention and the Hillary Clinton campaign, WikiLeaks has been at the center of much ominous hypothesizing in the press; the idea that Manafort had met with Assange to coordinate the leak would be the closest thing to proving “collusion” anyone’s seen yet.
Only problem: the Guardian piece was excruciatingly thin, attributed entirely to anonymous sources, and not corroborated by physical evidence like embassy visitor logs. So after the initial furor died down, that seemed to be the end of the Assange news cycle—until a couple other auxiliary figures from the rogue’s gallery of Trumpworld blundered their way into the public eye.
2) The Grifters Cometh
One of these rogues was Roger Stone, career GOP consultant, self-proclaimed “dirty trickster,” and former adviser to the Trump campaign. The other was Jerome Corsi, the conspiracy theorist and InfoWars contributor who knew Trump from his days of denying the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate. The pair are notorious grifters and longtime fabulists. This week, they’re at one another’s throats, as Corsi has accused Stone of coordinating with WikiLeaks to release the stolen emails at a time when they would be of maximum utility to the Trump campaign.
This is complicated, so bear with me: The Washington Post this week obtained a draft copy of a plea deal between Corsi and Mueller, under which Corsi would have pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with Stone during summer 2016 and testified that he helped coordinate contact between WikiLeaks and Stone. That plea deal has apparently now fallen apart, but Corsi continues to insist he helped Stone and WikiLeaks connect: “Stone had told me in advance about the Billy Bush video and asked me to get word to Assange to hold the release of the first batch of the Podesta emails until after the Washington Post had published the damaging Billy Bush ‘hot mic’ recording.”
Stone, for his part, denies the whole thing, calling it “preposterous” and “completely false.” The trouble here, of course, is that neither Stone nor Corsi resemble a reliable narrator. Nevertheless, if the special counsel is indeed possessed of the information contained in the draft plea deal, things will probably look dicier and dicier for Stone himself, if not for other members of the Trump campaign.
3) The Michael Cohen Story
Last but not least, we get to Thursday’s big reveal (are you overwhelmed yet?): another admission by another former Trump lackey that, yes, he lied to investigators on Trump’s behalf. This time, the guy in the chair was Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal attorney and bag man. Cohen had already pleaded guilty to financial crimes over the summer; this time, he was pleading guilty to lying to Congress about the extent of Donald Trump’s business dealings with Russia in the year leading up to the 2016 election.
Cohen had previously testified that Trump had shuttered talks of a potential Trump Tower in Moscow by January 2016; on Thursday, he admitted they had lasted until at least June of that year, by which point Trump had clinched the Republican presidential nomination. Further, Cohen testified that he had lied to Congress “to be consistent with Individual-1’s political messaging and out of loyalty to Individual-1,” referring to Trump. Trump himself, who frequently denied having any business dealings with Russia, responded to Cohen’s testimony by calling his former attorney “a weak person.”
The responses to Cohen’s testimony have been as predictable as you could expect, with the president’s foes declaring the discovery of yet another smoking gun for Russian collusion and his hangers-on pooh-poohing the testimony as yet another nothingburger. What is certain at this point is that President Trump has been caught in yet another lie about his campaign conduct. The biggest question remaining is why.
